Radio 1's One Big Weekend Kicks off ADLIB festival Season

The temperatures soared to sizzling along with the excitement for the BBC's One Big Weekend in beautiful Vaynol Park, Bangor, North Wales, which officially kicked off the UK 2010 Festival season, with ADLIB supplying sound for 5 areas and lighting for two.

Liverpool, UK based ADLIB has been involved in the event for many years, initially starting with the audio supply for one stage and their role has steadily grown. ADLIB account handler Phil Kielty says, "It's always a great pleasure to be involved in this event, which has its own unique vibe. One minute you can see an act play an unplugged set in the Live Lounge, an hour later you can see them headline the main stage – it really is a very special event".

The ADLIB crew of 14 was chiefed by Richy Nicholson, who also worked on the In New Music We Trust stage, the second largest of the event, headlined by Faithless on Saturday and Vampire Weekend on Sunday.

In New Music We Trust

The system was a JBL VerTec, chosen for its light weight - it was flown off a ground support system - and excellent quality for the dynamic range of music which featured up to 9 international artists per day.

They flew 6 x VT4889 boxes a side - as many as possible with the height of the ground support, and also supplied a left and right stack of 3 dV-DOSC infills per side plus 6 VerTec 4880A subs, ground stacked per side.

The FOH console was a Midas H3000 – an analogue console that was virtually guaranteed to be familiar to the host of guest engineers turning up to mix their bands.

With this was a standard ADLIB outboard rack which included 3 x SPX Yamaha 2000s, a TC M2000, Lexicon PCM 91 digital reverb and a TC D2 delay, together with a mix of Drawmer gates and BSS and dbx compressors.

Faithless brought in their own FOH console, and for Vampire Weekend, ADLIB supplied a Soundcraft vi6 spec'd by their engineer.

Camco Vortex 6 amps drove the VerTec 4889s with Labgruppen PLM14000s for the subs and L-Acoustics LA8s with inbuilt processing for the infills.

The system was zoned, EQ'd and delayed from a FOH rack of Dolby Lake Processors, looked after by the unfazable Chris Leckie.

Onstage, another Midas H3000 was used for monitors, with an identical outboard/FX rack to FOH, plus XTA graphics, gates, comps and a couple of reverbs. The PLM10000 amps (with inbuilt Dolby Lake processing) drove a total of 16 ADLIB low profile MP3 wedges, 2 stacks of L-Acoustics ARC and SB28s were used for sidefills and two dV-SUBS were used for some seriously atmospheric drum fills.

The half hour changeovers ensured that each day ran smoothly and to time, and also gave patch/mics guru Simon Lawson time to make the tea! Mics included Sennheisers, Shures, AKGs and Shure radio mics for the compares, plus a set of 6 Sennheiser G3 in-ears for selected acts. Sennheiser also had on-site technical support and extra equipment available to ensure the whole event went without a hitch.

At the end of each band, the physical graphics were left flat and the main system EQ was already set up, giving a good starting point to all the visiting engineers, who just had to set their own graphics on the desks.

BBC Introducing Stage

Showcasing the best of the upcoming talent, this stage was overseen by Chris Smethurst.

The combined FOH/monitor desk was a Yamaha M7CL on which the onboard processing was utilised. Kenny Christiansen took care of the stage and patch.

The wedges were 8 MP3 wedges and ADLIB's own drum fill cabinet.

Adlib Lighting designed a small high-impact lighting rig which was all ground supported and based around 6 vertical truss towers, 4 of them double stacked pre-rig at the back with CP61 bulbs, and two single loaded pre-rigged sections at the front with CP62s.

A total of 6 Martin Professional MAC 700 Spots were clamped to the sides of the rear uprights, along with 6 out of 8 MAC 250 Washes, with the remaining 2 x 250s on the floor. Six individual floor PARs lights were used as key light for the cameras.

The lighting console was an Avo Pearl Expert running Titan software - the perfect choice for a festival and busking situation, which was operated by Neil Holloway.

Live Lounge

ADLIB also supplied both PA and lighting for this area, including an ADLIB speaker system with 2 FD2 hi packs and 4 ADLIB DF315 Subs, complete with a Yamaha LS9-32 channel console, 8 wedges, Denon Mini Disc and Twin CD players and all necessary mics and stands.

The lighting system was controlled by another Avolites Pearl Expert operated by Charlie Rushton, and featured 12 JTE LED PixelPAR 90s on T-Bar stands which were perfect for the small stage with almost no heat emissions, and 6 Selecon 650W Fresnels.